Inverted Curvatures by Francis Raven
ISBN 1-933132-15-9   $13.00 US   |   $16.95 CAN


Find the book on Amazon>





Jayson and Molly live together. Their relationship is on the rocks, due in part to
Jayson’s representation of Molly in a novel he wrote and which made a lot of money.
She is going to break up with him. But before she can Jayson goes off to write poems
in a Thomas Kinkade gallery where he is murdered. Who killed Jayson? Who had
motive and access? The premise behind Inverted Curvatures is that detective novels
and romance novels work with opposing narrative curvatures. In a detective novel, the
body is found and the intentions come last. In a romance the intention to love comes
first and the body of that love is the conclusion to that story. Inverted Curvatures brings
these two narrative curves together in San Francisco using a poet, a philosophical
consultant, and a model. Through these characters (and through a comparison of the
artworks of Thomas Kinkade and Mark Tansey), the arc of american society is shown
not from a chronological perspective but from an analogical perspective which ultimately
questions the nature of representation and identity.